Medical school helps me write better

So I’m in my first year of medical school.  That obviously involves learning a lot about the human body and such.  It also requires a lot of studying to understand why things happen.  I figured I’d post an example of the type of detail I need to know for my anatomy tests this week.

Ulnar Claw vs Hand of Benediction | teachmeanatomy.

I’ll assume you actually clicked the link and at least looked at the site.  Very similar symptoms caused by very different mechanisms.  There are a lot of things like this sadly.

It is pretty awesome though.  It has also been surprisingly useful at times when trying to write the story or review the art for our webcomic.  In an upcoming chapter we deal with some seriously injured soldiers.  Before medical school, my thoughts on their injuries were more vague, like “his shoulders is all hurt-y.”  Now, I’m all like “lesions of nerves of the brachial plexus leads to a loss of innervation of the deltoid muscles preventing elevation of the arm at the shoulder.”

One of our artists drew an injured soldier and I was correcting his drawing to make it more clinically relevant.  Like any of our (future) readers will know or care that much about the physiology of any given soldier’s injury.  I care though, and we want to give you as realistic a story as possible, so when you see anything related to medicine in the comic, know that I at least put a lot of thought into making it as legit as I knew how.